I was looking at the Recent Responses page over a Duotrope and it occurred to me that there are quite a few stories floating around out there.
When I looked (around 2PM) there were 1,364 responses reported in the last week. That’s about 195 a day. From what I can tell from sites that report their submission stats, Duotrope accounts for about 10% of all submissions. This means that there are about 2,000 stories submitted every day.
Although people report more acceptances than rejections, the stats show that about 10% of all subs are accepted. Most of these are free sites and the flash sites where it is easier to place a story.
Their yearly stats show 75,000 reports, 60,000 rejects, 6,000 acceptances. There were 9,000 subs listed as no response, which means either the story was ignored or the author did not report.
The 10% acceptance seems to hold, perhaps a little less. Multiply all this by 10 and it looks like there were 750,000 submissions and 60,000 acceptances. If each rejection is resubmitted 6 times a year, then the number of total stories circulation is about 125,000.
The site lists about 3,000 fiction venues. That means that each zine publishes about 20 stories a year, which seems right. So the figures seem reasonable.
Reasonable? Who is writing 125,000 stories a year? I’m lucky if I produce half a dozen. I haven’t even written a word since I got stuck on my last story in January.
If everyone writes 6 stories a year on average then there are at least 20,000 people out there writing short stories. Maybe a quarter of these will even graduate to producing novels.
This is some scary stuff.